A Solitary Walk, Rosewell, Scotland—March 2005

Change accompanies me as I stride up the driveway between the chipped ruins of the snow and the confetti-scatter of snowdrops. Each creak of the wide-bellied trees is like a surge of growth furling strength under the bark.
Small birds are my harbingers. Their shadowy forms flit and scutter ahead, turn, peck and flash on again, their rapid ducks and starts the best way of picking them out on the tarmac. Above me the twitterings of other songbirds are drowned by the heavy metallic orations of the rooks. A glance up shows dozens of crosses silhouetted against the white sky.
Already the wind is strong, shaving close to my cheek with the attention of an expert barber. Now and again twigs, casualties of winter gales, snap under my feet with the surprise of a trap. I'll see no rabbits now, but looking up again I see the heavy shape of a bird of prey drift angel winged above the branches. The rooks set off in pursuit, shielding the first nests of the year. I leave the raucous combat behind, step out beside the road and turn right.
This road's a rat run, and every couple of minutes brings a big-engined car blaring up to the junction. The farm to the right, set back from the road by a half-hearted mix of fence, hedge and uninspired field, reflects the noise proudly from its grey sides.
On the left, an open field aligns itself with distant hills. Their shoulders are still draped with patchy snow, winter's last shawl, but the land closer to is in transition. No longer ice wrapped, it has not yet developed any touch of green, and so it lies bare to the swift chopping air that sports mischievously with the dead leaves in the hedge.
At the junction I cross the road, cross the ankle-deep mush of the disused railway and reach the cemetery road. Cut off from the main route by the path of the old rails, it could be a simple track down to death, a destination only of wreaths and marble, but the way I'm going it funnels open, becomes an advance into space.
At first each side is banked up, hedge topped and strewn with papery rubbish. When the snow was here the only trails were of dogs and their elderly walkers, whom I'd greet in response to their polite acknowledgements. Their faces showed hard lives, set jaws, the wrinkled spread of broken veins, an age of facing into cold air.
Towards the end of the road, the banks subside and the fields edge closer in. Crows sheen on the new-ploughed earth and look about with predatory eyes. On the right stands the stern grey of the chapel and beyond the gathering of drab houses that make up the village. Another big, broad road cuts this lane short.
A bus chumps in front of me. When it and the stained taste of its exhaust have gone, I cross, at first towards the decrepit grandeur of the gates down to the manor house, but then turning left on rough-top pavement alongside the squirmed bare stalks of another hedge, which then gives way to gaps and the cluttered soil that hugs around the bases of trees.
Plastic rubbish here colours the ground between the leaves, but crowds of snowdrops stand too. A single purple crocus has just presented its colour to the world among the ragged humps of grass that border the tarmac.
Now I pass two houses, reasonably comfortable and old looking, with gravel drives and well-tended gardens. One of them has a dog, which barks passively but insistently. Opposite, the crow-strewn field shows a different side, revealing the leisurely extent of its size.
I turn my back on it and crunch through a small rectangle of wind-battled trees. The thin strip of path is mud-clinging, and my feet struggle through, gathering a narrow crust of bright earth. Sawdust golds the brown. Some of the old trees cracked under winter's onslaught and the woodsmen have been at work. The yellow cuts in the fallen logs show the timber's deep hardness.
The little path ends at a farm track that, to the left, leads quickly back to the road. To the right it lays down a long invitation to the hills. The mud is shallow here, spread broad across a stony surface and matted with the cottoned stalks of plants whose forms have proved too weak for the season and walkers' feet.
The track goes slightly uphill and its verges are scattered with endless flutterings of farm rubbish. On both sides, sparse hedges break off the sweep of fields coming in from the middle distance, where they are disrupted again by the roofs of bracketing villages. Soon there is no more noise of cars from the main roads, but the wind carries howling and barking mournfully from the dogs' home away to the left. The air begins to bite here, and afterscent of snow whips down from the hills ranged against the sky ahead.
Wire fences snake their restraint through the cut-back hedges, mirroring the two strands of electricity cable that loop from pylon to pylon above my left shoulder. Bird voices chirp up again as I draw closer to the white box of a house, its walls clean and firm between the uncertain coilings of trees stooping down by it. It sits on a crossing of tracks, one to the left plunging into the fields and away; the one opposite keeps close to a blank stone wall until the trees cover it in their grey mass.
Across from the house stands a dull garage, almost entirely neglected, with bags and wrappings along its feet. Behind the cottage, swathed in a cloud of bare shrubby trees, there's a garden full of honesty. The plants' white oval seed pods swing and shudder behind a greening wooden gate. I go straight over the sky-pale faces of broad puddles, my boots crushing the tractor trails back into mud.
Soon, there's a small stand of fir trees in whose depths again there are drifts of discarded plastic. Beyond this, up a short slope, the world opens up again, and I'm eye-level with pied hills who send a blustery kiss like a challenge into me. All the birds have put their heads under their wings but the great fields that lie sprawled like the skins of beasts are showing the first break from seed this year.
My eyes have to look hard for the green that tiptoes its presence over the soil's rich brown, but it's there. A few days ago the only colour was white touched by melancholy blue, but now the naked branches for off to the left are incongruous remnants of past months. On the right, the funereal ranks of pines beyond the field stutter and break to give glimpses of the grand top of the manor house. The dignified stonework looks lost out here, blundering about from grass to woodland.
The path leads soberly down and the wind drops a little. Tufts of hedge are linked by wire, as before, until suddenly the valley's flooded with trees and the mud thickens ankle deep. A band of stones on either side indicates that I'm crossing the bridge.
Under it, the stream spits its way among weeds and stones, its rippling playing counterpoint to the moving branches overhead. The track coils up steeply, but a tiny tempting path leads off to the right, promising deep access to the woods. I hesitate but hold back, remember the way the earth sucked at my feet last time I was here, in the middle of the thaw.
The stream boomed by then, and was joined a little way into the undergrowth by a tributary carrying icy fresh melt down from the hilltop. The earth banks alongside the track in which the trees set their roots were coiled about with vapour in the sunlight. Today, in the cloud, the earth is merely damp and tributary stream is silent.
As the track bends upwards, bushes form a thick border to the route, barely giving any hint of the other side. Chaffinches hop from twig to twig with agitation, and a flock of them sets off in panic ahead of me. When I look back they've looped back and I can see their little heads in the branches glaring at me.
The going underfoot firms back to stones and sand, and the high bushes fall away. I can see the fields again, taste the wind. Trees net magpies and crows in their dull shadows on the sky but other birds swoop and turn, masters of the land within my reach and that which stretches, gradually bluing, as far as the horizon.